The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

In 1939 Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer in Vienna, was arrested with his sixteen-year-old son Fritz and deported to Buchenwald. Through years of forced labor and starvation, Gustav kept a small secret diary. When he was selected for transfer to Auschwitz, a move that meant almost certain death, Fritz refused to be separated and volunteered to go with him. The book follows father and son through Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and the final chaos of the war's end, reconstructing their survival from Gustav's journal, camp records, and interviews with the Kleinmann family who lived. Jeremy Dronfield tells a true story of a bond that outlasted the Nazi machinery built to destroy it, tracing every transfer, illness, and near miss that kept the two of them alive.